Hell
by Phantom Lightning
Summary: Being a ghost was hell. No, not metaphorical hell, it was actual hell.


**oh god I can't even.**

**When I woke up, I expected to see a happy, cracky fanfic that I wrote when I was half asleep and hyped up on sugar.**

**I don't even want to proofread it. Why is it that everything I write when half asleep is either like an acid trip or really depressing?**

* * *

Being a ghost was hell.

No, not metaphorical hell, it was actual hell.

Ember McLain never wanted to be forgotten. She sang and she mesmerised crowds all over the world, but the next day no one even knew her name.

Being a ghost meant looking at yourself and seeing what you hated most, what you feared.

It meant taking your emotions and wrenching them out of shape like silly putty until you were a monster, and then it meant sometimes breaking out of that shell and looking at yourself and wondering, "what have I done?"

It meant you would become so wrapped and tortured and choked by your worst fear, you would become it with only a few brief moments of lucidity that you would wish you never had.

Wulf just wanted to be understood. His worst fear would be to be trapped in a land where he was hated and couldn't communicate, no matter how hard he cried.

He became a creature that looked like a werewolf, something that people would run away from, without even the chance to ask to be understood.

Box ghost was crushed to death. He was abandoned by his friends, the ones he had given his life for, the ones that he had pushed out the way when he saw the avalanche of boxes, and they just ran, never looking back, never sparing even an afterthought for the friend they had left, bleeding and broken under a mountain of boxes. He was just so lost and afraid; he chased others away and embraced the boxes, the ones that at least didn't run away from him.

Being a ghost meant not even being a shell of your former self. It meant being something that you yourself would run away from, something that took your very essence and polluted it with your worst fears and hatred. You would break once you saw your hands, so unnaturally coloured and glowing softly, when once, they were a natural colour glowing with life, against that swirling green sky, purple doors that were each a doorway to another part of hell. It defied every law of physics you ever knew, and you would shatter like a piece of glass from all the trauma from discovering your powers reflected the very thing that killed you.

You would look down and see your skin blackened and encrusted with ice if you died from the cold, or become a hideous, rabid beast, the very same one that you backed away from and begged to spare your life. Sometimes you would see a river of red splashing and sloshing with every step you took, never running out and dissipating once you got too far away from it, like it just flew back under your skin. Sometimes you would see weapons cruelly twisted into your skin, becoming an actual part that you could never hope to remove. Sometimes it was the effects of disease, warping your body.

Always, you would feel the pain coursing through you, the same pain that killed you, only without the relief of death. If you died from cold, you would feel that numb, hollow feeling, that feeling that wanted to lull you to sleep.

Ghosts couldn't sleep, but they always dreamed.

Danny Fenton looked at himself and thought of cold, sterile rooms, of something new and never seen before, of a brave new world shattered int oa million glittering needle edged pieces, of something that seemed wonderful and beautiful at first, but soon bared its twisted, warped underbelly when you were utterly convinced that it was nothing but good.

He saw the exact opposite of what he had ever wanted to be.

There was black where there was once white, poisonous acid green where there was once a light, crystal blue. His ghost powers warped him, made him what he never wanted to be.

There was death where there was once life, twisted obsession where there was once merely an urge to protect his friends, cruel, cold inhumanity where there was once the emotions of human that only wanted to be loved.

Sometimes, he looked into the mirror in his bathroom and wondered it maybe his eyes were colder and more like the colour of the ice beams he so loved to use, or if the colour of his hair really was jut a shade lighter and nearing grey instead of its once ebony colour.

He tried to dismiss them as his mind playing tricks on him, but it was hard when his parents remarked that his hair used to be darker.

He tried to ignore the white, icy sharp stabbing feeling of pain he felt when in his ghost form that felt just like how he felt when he first went into the ghost portal.

He also ignored how he was also beginning to feel a dull, throbbing pain even when in his human form.

He tried to ignore the inverted world he saw in the mirror, where Phantom was the only one who looked back at him with no Fenton in sight.

It was worth it, he told himself, to protect the things he loved so that nothing could ever take them from him.

They were his, and he only wanted to keep them safe, away from anyone else to be able to even see them.

That was rational, right?


End file.
